Will's original intention, which didn't really come to fruition in the final game, was that Spore would have a "T" shaped structure, where you start at the base of the "T" and work your way up to the top bar, like a guided tutorial.
The top bar of the "T" is is a horizontal intergalactic storytelling game spanning all the other levels, that lets you swoop back down to the lower levels.
But the swooping down part didn't really work, because it was hard to come up with scenarios, missions, and stories about unicellular organisms that were relevant to intergalactic civilizations (or players).
So the layers tended to be isolated from each other, and not have direct or interesting effects on each other, because of their different physical and temporal and technological scales.
The fact that each layer was developed by a different team also caused dependency problems that limited the possibility space, the way each layer had to made its own assumptions that would constrain the adjacent layers (a problem you wouldn't have if they were all independent games).
And the storytelling aspect didn't work as well as it did with The Sims, which let you simply take screen snapshots and write captions and publish them on The Sims Exchange. That was because people know more about the interpersonal dynamics of families (or even cities) than unicellular organisms or intergalactic civilizations, so players have their own stories to tell and don't need much support from the game simulation itself.
For example, there is no need to actually simulate or model the motivations or feelings of Sims characters when you're writing or acting out a story about them: That's all up to the player to use their imagination to fill in.
But there just aren't as many interesting topics to write stories about in the higher and lower levels of Spore, that aren't focused on individual people or communities.
https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-future-of-content-will-wri...
>T shaped game.
>The base of the T is a goal oriented gaming.
>The player first goes through a tutorial and sandbox to learn editing tools and game play at each level.
>Player can eventually surf down to the lower levels.
>Goal oriented game trains you to use all the editors and teaches you the simulation dynamics at every level, from bottom to top.
>Once you get to the top you can surf vertically down into the other games, that you’ve learned to use on the way up.
>At the top of the T is a collection of science fiction story genres, that take place on top of all of the lower levels.
>Once you make your way all the way up from unicellular life to intergalactic civilization, the storytelling begins.
>Pull out to galactics level, 10’s of thousands of worlds.
>Like the movie Powers to Ten.
>Always wanted to roll this into a game.
>SETI: Drake’s equation: N = R fs fp ne fl fi fc L.
>Each term of the equation correspond to different power of scale.
>“Wright linked Drake’s equation, which computes the probability of life occurring in the universe, with the long zoom of Eames’ Powers of Ten film.” -Chaim Gingold, A Brief History of Spore
Chaim Gingold, A Brief History of Spore:
http://www.levitylab.com/blog/2011/02/brief-history-of-spore...
>Story
>Spore’s early concept had no structured sense of time or sequence. Would players begin by forming a stable galaxy, stars, planets, and then set to creating life? Or perhaps they would evolve life on a planet, hit it with some asteroids, and try to get panspermia to happen? Like a universe before a creation myth, Spore had no obvious beginning, middle, or end. Deciding the game would move through a handful of stages, from cells to creatures, up through civilization, and then into space exploration, was crucial to getting the game concept to gel, at a high level.
>Structured narratives are unusual for Maxis games, but Spore’s vast scope required a skeletal structure to hang the game off of. Besides, what story could be more appropriate than the evolution of life, and development of civilization? The story allowed both the developers and players to locate themselves in a narrative about the growth and expansion of life. It became possible to inhabit one phase of the game, and think about where you were coming from, and where you were off to. As developers, we could divide our efforts, and think about how the design grew out of the previous level, through this one, and into the next phase of the game. Even with this high level linear structure, Spore was still a monster project, in terms of scope. And, of course, by dividing our production effort into level based teams we set up any kind of inter-level design tradeoff and coordination to be an organizational hassle.